Advice for leaders: You can’t look away anymore

Shell Australia chair Zoe Yujnovich has called for Australia to have a carbon tax “as quick as we can”.

The West Australian

VideoShell Australia chair Zoe Yujnovich has called for Australia to have a carbon tax “as quick as we can”.

The head of the Australian operations of the world’s fifth-biggest company has given a revealing insight into successful business culture, saying it could be judged by “what people do when no one is watching”.

Ms Yujnovich told The West Australian’s Leadership Matters breakfast event yesterday the ability to do that was the result of the culture of her business, saying that if the culture did not work, there was nowhere to hide.

She said setting the right tone from the top of an organisation was the key. “Call something out, identify what needs to change ... because in not doing so creates an acceptance of the behaviour,” she said.

The West Coast Eagles board member said Shell’s first focus was safety. The Dutch giant has about 300 workers living on its giant Prelude vessel off the Kimberley, preparing to make LNG from gas that first flowed on Christmas Day.

“We use safety as the guiding light that orientates our organisation and reinforces how we want people to behave,” she said.

She said caring about safety had to be more than empathy and coaching. People who took short cuts had to be held to account, otherwise their goal posts moved on what was acceptable.

“The consequences of not intervening can be interpreted as a silent endorsement that allows these behaviours to propagate,” she said. Ms Yujnovich said business leaders could not simply say what must be done, but show how it was to be done.

She endorsed Commissioner Kenneth Hayne’s conclusion from the banking royal commission that the culture of a business could be judged by “what people do when no one is watching”.

“It’s so important because, as we know, in today’s age everyone is always watching,” Ms Yujnovich said. “It’s difficult to imagine how society’s expectations will escalate.”

She said resource companies had a particular obligation to provide value to the Australian people.

“We must be trusted stewards of natural resources,” she said. “We must do the right thing in the broader interests of all parties.”

Ms Yujnovich returned to Perth two years ago to lead the Australian operations of Shell.

It was an extraordinary promotion for the University of WA engineering graduate who had only been with the Dutch giant for two years after a career with miner Rio Tinto.

The marathon runner and the chair of oil and gas lobby group APPEA travels to Shell’s headquarters in the Netherlands every couple of months and has a coal seam gas and LNG business in Queensland to manage.

Those commitments make balancing work and personal life — which includes her husband and three sons — a challenge.

Her preferred approach to keep the two separate does not always work, as she found out when she shared a table with one of her sons, helping him with his chemistry homework while finalising yesterday’s speech. Ms Yujnovich said employees needed to understand how their efforts contributed to the larger goals of their organisation.

“Inevitably there will always be setbacks ... but if you really got that vision for why it is so important to be successful, it gives you the courage . . . the motivation to work your way through those roadblocks,” she said.

It was important at work to make time for a chat, a laugh, and to say thanks. “If we ... forget to do those little things, inevitably it’s fairly lonely, isolated success,” she said.